70 quotes from “Provocation as Leadership” (by Maxime Fern and Michael Johnstone)

1. To exercise leadership and create change, you must disturb people. But provoking without alienating people already under pressure, or shutting them down, can be a complex task. (Page 7)
2. Most of us do not take kindly to being disturbed, particularly if our habits, traditions, and loyalties are involved. (1)
3. Learning, growth, and change are possible but require skill, will, and deep commitment and love for individuals and their welfare. (2)
4. Provocation is a skill set, a mindset, an analytic process, and an emotional experience that needs to be crafted, practiced, and refined over time. (3)
5. Provocation is an essential tool for progress, adaptation, and change across a wide range of sectors and current problems. (5)
6. Most learning and change comes from experiment, trial, and error, exactly what you are asking your participants to do. (9)
7. For us, provocation should be viewed as constructive troublemaking, rather than something negative. Indeed, we want to avoid any stigma associated with it. (11)
8. We have found, to our surprise, that it can even be provocative not to provoke, confounding others' expectations. (12)
9. Provocation is essential to generating the learning necessary for adaptation. (13)
10. Most people prefer their current situation to unknown ones. (14)
11. For stable patterns to shift, we all need to be disturbed by an unexpected and often unwelcomed event or action. (14)
12. Displacement and rearrangement is part of adaptation and at the heart of leadership work. (14)
13. Organizations and communities adapt, thrive, and grow when they learn how to confront issues. They become maladaptive when they do not. A problem only becomes salient when patterns of unproductive behaviors start to impede life and progress. (15)
14. It is hard to persuade people away from known routines, even when they see that their habits create problems. (15)
15. When straightforward advice, suggestions, compelling data, and argument are not enough to alter behavior, it is necessary to provoke people to see beyond their current visibility threshold. (15)
16. Provocation instigates a battle between the wisdom people have in protecting themselves and where they are currently invested in and the wisdom of a larger, change-oriented perspective. (15)
17. The intention when challenging people is to keep the temperature within a productive zone of disequilibrium or discomfort. In this space, you have people's attention. They are engaged, and learning takes place. (22)
18. You can generate unpredictable and intense reactions, even while believing that you've been respectful and moderate. (22)
19. Provocation restarts the process of adaptation, energizes engagement, and builds capacity. Provocation is, however, more than a simple act of saying or doing something that disturbs people. It is an interaction between people, events, and systems that creates momentum. (25)
20. Provocation is both orchestrated and emergent. A dance between the conductor, the orchestra, the listener, and the music. (25)
21. As provocative actors, we use a range of specific tools, capabilities, and mindsets within each blueprint, flexibly intervening moment by moment, as well as with a strategic longer-term view. (27)
22. Provocation begins with diagnosis and situational awareness, and requires a fine ear for listening as well as skillful questioning, especially those that help open the system up. (33)
23. The five elements of a provocative mindset include an appetite for risk, being nimble, a willingness to be scrutinized, unpredictability, and an appreciation of diverse inputs. (33)
24. Observation, interpretation, and questioning are strong forces, which shift the patterns holding people in place or restrain change. (34)
25. Observation helps resist the temptation, the universal default, to jump quickly into action. (35)
26. Increasing people's awareness is, by its nature, provocative because previously invisible information, such as who or what is privileged and at what cost, is now available. (37)
27. Interpretations, which often follow behavioral observation or emotional reflection, are hypotheses, speculations, or conjectures about the dynamics of a group or system. (37)
28. Interpretation is a technique that combines selecting and naming facts with the power to highlight less visible meaning or assumptions, or draw attention to an unnoticed or unexplored element. (37)
29. In essence, an interpretation is an intervention that asks others to reflect on the different ways to consider the challenge at hand, be it immediate or more significant and longer term. (38)
30. Questions are leverage, allowing you to prize open the locked box of prevailing thought and behavior, where you can dig deeper, revealing unexamined and divergent beliefs and stirring creative thinking and discovery. (39)
31. Context is the dynamic environment within which leadership action occurs. (47)
32. Context is the invisible product of location, history, and prior decisions. A change agent or team leader must learn to see as much as possible and reveal existing pressures, to understand the colors or tone of the situation. (47)
33. The ripeness of the issue is the degree to which there is an existing or emerging consensus that something needs to be done about a problem. (50)
34. There is no point in experimenting or trying something new if the issue isn't ripe or relevant parties are unwilling or unable to pay attention. (50)
35. A crisis requires immediate and targeted action, but many adaptive problems, held in place by a history of habits and hidden practice, may lack urgency. (50)
36. You shouldn't leave change to chance and goodwill. Leadership involves putting pressure on people at critical times and building their capacity to do the same with each other, while keeping in mind the context and the type of challenges faced. You must tailor your interventions to each situation. (51)
37. Provocative work requires a holding environment. At its simplest, a process that fosters difficult conversations and learning by creating a mixture of safety and discomfort. (52)
38. There must be enough cohesion to offset the disequilibrium generated when you undertake adaptive work. (52)
39. Interactions between places and spaces, over time, foster transformation and productivity. (64)
40. The greater the variation, the greater the problem-solving, innovation, and adaptability. (64)
41. Radical scrutiny also requires and develops a high level of humility. If others can scrutinize you, question you, and hold you to account, you learn quickly. (65)
42. Staying humble means being aware of and admitting what you don't know. It means coming to love your mistakes as a source of learning and asking for help. (65)
43. Double binds explain why developing a culture of honest feedback and transparency is so complicated. You are damned if you do, and damned if you don't. (70)
44. If you wish to challenge someone's worldview, a good place to start is to point out that resistance and loss are a precondition to change. (74)
45. Using personal and business stories can help open people up to change, can provoke and stimulate thinking, and free people up to themselves and new possibilities. (82)
46. By connecting to our feelings, a story will activate and appeal to our more trusting, empathic, and altruistic selves. (83)
47. A story wakes us up, and we identify with the storyteller, activating mirror neurons, cells in our brain that allow us to feel and understand others' actions. (86)
48. A story becomes a means of connecting people to a shared truth in a short space of time. (86)
49. When people are stuck in their heads, you want to move the focus from abstract and intellectual to emotion and concrete. (90)
50. The status quo is just a fancy name for all those personal or organizational routines you use because they orient you toward what you know how to do and what is expected. However, the unusual introduces variation, gives you scope to highlight critical issues, and confound expectations. (95)
51. A surprise is the archenemy of predictability and control, so stretching yourself helps ensure that you challenge yourself regularly. (95)
52. As journalist Eric Sevareid observed in his 1964 essays, “Next to power without honor, the most dangerous thing is power without humor.” (103)
53. Leadership is also essentially about love, about not being willing to accept outcomes for others that you wouldn't accept yourself. If you don't act, then, in effect, you are saying, these people don't matter. (140)
54. Bringing attention to hidden and ignored issues enables greater agility, and how provoking an organization to change requires “giving the work back” to staff. (142)
55. A successful and novel experiment becomes what is sometimes called a “strange attractor.” That is where a new event unsettles existing practice and triggers a cascade where novelty flourishes. (157)
56. Staying on top of the facts is essential for maintaining calm and confidence during a crisis. (161)
57. Provocation creates disturbance until new ways are proposed and explored, the unknown becomes more familiar, and a new equilibrium is created. (173)
58. The ultimate test of any reform, catalyzed by initial policy (and annealed in the heat of reaction, discussion, and conflict), is creating the greatest public good with the smallest amount of damage. (175)
59. A significant risk of provocative action is that you overstep the mark, create a firestorm, and hurt people. (202)
60. Accepting that loss is painful is fundamental to effective leadership. (205)
61. Any challenging intervention that pushes people beyond their tolerance level will usually be wasted, because the recipients cannot fully absorb the ideas. (207)
62. No one will thank you, at least initially, if you unsettle their lives, push them to make complex adjustments, and give up what was comfortable. (208)
63. There is a delicate balance between the leadership act of provoking others, because it is needed, and reassuring people that you are not a risk to them or someone who should be avoided. (209)
64. Therefore, as a provocateur, you should understand what is at stake for others, which role you are drawing on, and how those critical of your goals might attack you using any means available. (209)
65. Self-care, listening to trusted confidants, and keeping interests outside your field of work can help you separate the self from the role, question your motives, and maintain your judgment. (210)
66. Provocation also helps initiate a longer-term focus during which you build structures for ongoing learning. (214)
67. Strong relationships and trust assist in regulating the disequilibrium that inevitably occurs. (218)
68. Creating provisional zones through ritual, warm-up, and practice reduces the disturbance in a system and temporarily allows people to learn what is necessary to survive and thrive. There will be plenty of time for provocation and more disruption later. (218)
69. The more rigid and entrenched a system is, the more potent and persistent the provocation needs to be. (225)
70. You also have to think about the reciprocal side of provoking others: your capacity and willingness to be provoked by others or the situation you are in. (234)

Maxime Fern and Michael Johnstone

Provocation as Leadership: A Roadmap for Adaptation and Change

Routledge

New York, 2023